THE STRANGER IN MY HOME
  • Home
  • Vignettes
    • Encounters
    • Events
    • Experiences
    • Epiphanies
  • Stories
  • Fables
  • Translations
  • Miscellany
  • Now/Then

now  /  then

blogs and blends

Tea and Me

5/6/2017

2 Comments

 
​Wei, a Chinese farmer hated seeing a squalid temple on the daily walk to his field in the Fujian province. He had no money for paint or masonry. He just took a broom and cleaned it thoroughly. He did it every week and, before leaving, lit an incense. One night he was told in a dream that he would be rewarded for his good work: he would find a treasure in a cave behind the temple. He was to share it with his neighbors.
 
He found nothing but a single tea shoot in the cave. He took it home, planted and nurtured it, and, when the bush grew, he gave cuttings to all he knew. He even made money by selling the cuttings in the market. Everybody agreed it was best tea they had ever tasted, a real treasure. The plant came to be known as Tieguanyin, the goddess of mercy. Now the goddess presides over her merciful potion in millions of home, a drink the world most consumes second only to water.
Picture
Are you bored or tired? Drink some tea.
Are you distressed and unhappy? Try a cup of tea.
Are you happy? For Heaven’s sake, celebrate with a large pot of tea.
 
These, at least, were the counsel of my dear father. He loved tea. He would never dream of letting his wife, let alone his undiscriminating son (me), buy tea; he went to a special store and had the storekeeper mix different black teas to his specification. The day he retired from work, he even took over the ritual of making the morning tea; mother happily relinquished, for she continued to work. I gladly stayed away from their dawn debut. I did not care to leave my bed that early. In any case – now it may be revealed – I did not care for father’s strong brew.
 
My pedestrian palate took many years more to wake up to the charm of tea. I love even its short, simple name. The Chinese who have discovered all sorts of unpleasant things like diabetes to decimal fractions seem to have found tea as the ultimate solace. They called the stuff ‘te’ in Min Chinese and ‘cha’ in Mandarin Chinese. The Dutch took a leading role in tea trade and popularized the term ‘tea’, which entered French and Spanish with minor variation, while the Portuguese traders settled in Macau adopted the Cantonese variation ‘cha’ and brought it into Persian, Turkish, Korean and Japanese.

Picture
How did it all begin? The idea of pouring boiling water on the cured leaves of Camellia Sinensis and getting a beverage probably started as a medicinal exercise, until the Han dynasty in China made it into an elite drink at the start of the Common Era. The Tang dynasty, which started larger cultivation in mountains, helped the practice grow. In India’s Himalayan region too tea was extensively used as a drink with a medical value. Slowly tea became fashionable in the Netherlands, Germany and France. Catherine of Braganza brought her taste to the English court in the 17th century when she married Charles II and the British started the practice of mixing milk and sugar with tea. Black tea soon outpaced green tea in consumption and the tea trade multiplied swiftly.
 
To break the Chinese monopoly, the British tried several times in the 19th century to bring plants from China secretly and plant those in their Indian colony, until they found native plants in Darjeeling and Assam and in Sri Lanka. They even offered free land to Europeans who agreed to cultivate tea.

Picture
Good tea isn’t easy to cultivate. Tea plants require acidic soil, warm climate and at least fifty inches of rain. They take a long time to mature: three years to harvest and five to nine years to produce seeds. There are of course many strains, classified mainly by leaf size: the Chinese are small, the Assamese large and the Cambodian intermediate. The plants can grow large, but they are pruned to be accessible for harvesting every two weeks. Only two inches of leaves and buds, called flushes, are picked at a time. In tea cultivation quality is paramount.
 
Tea processing is no easier. White tea is wilted (water-extracted) but unoxidized (pan-roasted); popular black tea, called red tea by the Chinese, is fully wilted and oxidized; oolong tea is wilted and partly oxidized; green and yellow tea are both unwilted and unoxidized. Tastes vary, and the industry seems eager to respond with a larger variety. All loose and bagged tea is blended, with varied tastes in mind. There is also tea to which a special flavor is added. For a change I have had tea with bergamot, as in Earl Gray, or tea with orange flavor, as in Constant Comment. Tea with mint is very common.

Picture
Tea for me is also memory.
 
Tea is my parents sitting on the deck and sipping a morning cup before the world or children interrupted their peaceful hour. Tea is my college mates thrusting a stained cup at me in a smoke-filled cafeteria to celebrate an electoral victory. Tea is my favorite professor, Amlan Datta, telling me that tea is not just for taste but also for flavor and I should try jasmine tea. Tea is the Roys passing me a steaming cup after another on a breezy terrace in Jodhpur Park. Tea is the only pathetic item I could afford when I persuaded a pretty coed in the university to join me in a restaurant. Tea, glorious tea, is what we drank in abundance when I and fellow oarsmen won a minor event in a rowing regatta. Tea, bitter tea, is what I agonizingly sipped in a hospital café when my baby daughter underwent surgery. I have had tea in tiny clay pots in Indian railways stations, in plastic cups in Colombian buses, in delicate china in Hong Kong’s legendary Peninsular Hotel, from Jane’s large Chinese teapot, from my Russian neighbor’s showy samovar, from shiny, nondescript machines in Virginia’s motels, from the tiny Vietnamese contraption a friend gave me. I remember drinking tea with shift workers in a factory where I was an intern, with actors during break in a play I was stage-managing, with guerillas in Kathmandu, refugees in Cuba, tourists in Venice and students on a boat from Germany to Switzerland.

Through all these memories is the strongest one: mother, then a sprightly young woman, offering me my first cup of Darjeeling tea in India.

India has changed a lot since I lived there. One way it hasn’t is that people still offer a cup of tea the moment I step into a home.

I never say No.

2 Comments
Alpana Ghosh
5/7/2017 05:38:12

Beautifully written! As soon as I finished reading, I made myself a cup of tea and I missed you!

Reply
Manish
5/7/2017 21:54:56

Thank you for your comment. I celebrated with a cup of tea too!

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Manish Nandy

    Writer, Speaker, Consultant
    Earlier: Diplomat, Executive


    Archives

    January 2022
    December 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015

    RSS Feed


    Categories

    All

Proudly powered by Weebly
© Manish Nandy 2015  The Stranger in My Home